I don’t really PVP. It isn’t that I hate it or anything, it just doesn’t float my boat. It used to piss me off that I felt I needed to PVP to PVE. Some of the gear was must have for bears. Mainly weapons. What really gets me about PVP is with PVP balancing it always seems like cats get crapped on for PVE.
Dev 1: "Bleeds are to OP in PVP"
Dev 2: "Nerf them."
Dev 1: "What about the loss of damage in PVE from that?"
Dev 2: "They’ll be fine. They still have BR"
Dev 1: "But so do the DKs in 4.1"
Dev 2: "Did you see the new Dodge Challenger?"
Dev 1: "OMG YES that thing is awesome."
Dev 2: "My wife wants one."
Dev 1: "You going to get it for her?"
Dev 3: "What are you guys doing?"
Dev 2: "Talking about the new Challenger."
Dev 3: "Thats so cool."
I know it would most likely take a MAJOR recoding of things but what if PVP and PVE where separate? When your toon was in a BG or arena your stats and spells acted 1 way and in a dungeon or raid they acted a different way. That would be easy, the problem comes in the form of world PVP. And I don’t have an answer. Blizz says things like bring the player not the class. I agree. They made that easy enough with the homogenation of abilities. Problem is the classes main job is still very varried. I have made many arguements about how much better a skilled feral is to a raid then a reg so and so. But if you are in guild A and all your members have same gear and same skill it wont be bring the player it will be bring the class. Things like we want you to play your way are thrown out there. You can do this but don't excpect to play your way with anyone else if it is bad. Looking through our raid last night i noticed EVERY buff/debuff is covered. With 4 druids and 3 locs my BR dosn't really give me a leg up. (HA! leg up. thats a cat pee joke.) Right now my skill level is caring me to top 5-10 on DPS charts. But others will get better. At least I hope they do. PVP nerfs are killing the PVE bring the player philosophy.

Be sure to subscribe to The Fluid Druid RSS feed and follow me on twitter! @Sylvaneart

I'm not really following, could you elaborate on what PVP nerfs killed that PVE philosophy? The bleed DPS loss was offset by the Shred gain; we'd still be bottom of the barrel DPS even with the old DPS model.

Blizz always mentions that they don't want to make a class "learn" two ways each ability will act, PVP and PVE, and for the most part I agree - I don't want to have to remember that Cyclone works on X and Y mobs in PVE but only works in Z situations in PVP. But I've always wondered - why change what things 'do', and instead, just tweak the underlying numbers to tune for PVE and PVP as separate values, particularly the damage? I'm not going to notice if there is a difference between Mangle damage in PVE versus PVP, so long as the damage it does feels right in relation to my other abilities. They could've lowered bleeds by 10% and buffed Mangle/Shred by bunches for PVP, and solved the tuning problem they were trying to deal with, without affecting PVE at all, and yet the class still plays exactly the same as before. There's nothing to relearn, no radical difference going from PVE to PVP. Sure, the difference in damage is there, but it has always been there, because of resilience!

I would love for pvp and pve to be completely separate, but alas that's something they'll probably not ever implement...honestly if they could just make that one paid competition thing they have free and let the pvpers flock to it and just remove any relevance it has in the main game, that would be good. Oh well...

Fate: I don't agree, I use more than 95% of the feral arsenal in pretty much the same way, and the other 5% is trivial crap like using FF to keep people out of stealth or Thorns maybe to act as a "junk buff" to protect another buff. Or more to the point, I use far more of my abilities at various points in PVP (Maim, heals, bearform, CC, etc) and a very very limited subset of those abilities in PVE (for an even more limited set of purposes). Could you give examples of abilities you feel are used so differently in PVE?

Shin: 6 and a half years man, the PVP has been a big part of this game. I'd get used to it...

Syl, I'd be curious - take a close look at your WoL parses for Atramedes vs say Chim - are the Rip/Shred/Rake damage ratios really that different? Because in my experience, it makes much less of a difference than we think. I think its because when we 'refresh a Rip' on a boss that's about to go away, we forget that Shred is what put most of those combo points there in the first place, so you already recovered part of the missing +10% bleeds with the +25% Shreds that led up to the Rip, at least.

2-3 normal Shreds to leave a +10% Rip/Rake on the fly-away
versus
2-3 +25% Shreds to leave a +0% Rip/Rake on the fly-away
seems like a wash to me, especially considering how infrequent "flyaways" really are throughout most fights. (And lets not forget the facedesk moments where the guy gets off the ground with 4-5 CP's and no Rip...)

I think our DPS problem is a scaling issue, and if there was a perception of better DPS before that patch than after, it is more likely to be because we were doing decent at the raid gear prevalent at that patch and not so hot in our current, poorly scaling upgrades.

Yes my shred does put those CP up but when Atra is flying it is only my bleeds working. Ranged classes are not hampered by this as they can still shoot at flying stuff. Since they arn't alowing me to direct damage a boss for portions of a fight it just isnt enough to say the bleed is nerfed but shred is buffed. Not to mention my 4pT11 buff dropping off during this time. I know if I really wanted to i could shift and moonfire the boss but that is just so far fetched. If my bleeds worked like they did pre-nerf it wouldn't hurt my DPS so much to be off the boss.

Be sure to subscribe to The Fluid Druid RSS feed and follow me on twitter! @Sylvaneart

But those arguments are true regardless of the PVP "nerf". Having or not having a measly +10% on a couple dots we leave on a flyaway does virtually nothing to help us compete with people that can still crank through their full DPS rotation. They're going to kick our ass with or without that buff. That's a Blizzard raid design issue and I think far more relevant to our current DPS state than the bleed nerf in question.

cynrh wrote:But those arguments are true regardless of the PVP "nerf". Having or not having a measly +10% on a couple dots we leave on a flyaway does virtually nothing to help us compete with people that can still crank through their full DPS rotation. They're going to kick our ass with or without that buff. That's a Blizzard raid design issue and I think far more relevant to our current DPS state than the bleed nerf in question.

There is a huge advantage for ranged in this tier. Melee have perhaps 2-3 fights we will excell at more then ranged will. However if we were middle of the pack for other melee this might not be as big of a deal. What makes it worse is we have the longest melee ramp up time when coming back to a boss. Our 4p bonus needs 3 sub optimal strikes to get going, 1 bleed, and at least 6 combo points for finishing moves. No other melee has to deal with that kind of start up when coming back to a boss that has been out of range or switching to a new target. With TF and FC up you can get this going pretty quick. But if you don't have either up or can't FC at all in the encounter, or you have a bad miss/dodge string you are hit pretty hard.

There are 2 fights (Chimaron, Al'akir) that do not require a target change or at least 30 seconds off the boss. Having our bleeds nerfed and direct melee strikes buffed does not make up the difference in PVE. We still lose a fair amount of damage becuse of this. Does it mean that would fix our scaling and we would be in the middle of the other DPS? No, but it did hurt more then Blizzard would like to admit.

cynrh wrote:But those arguments are true regardless of the PVP "nerf". Having or not having a measly +10% on a couple dots we leave on a flyaway does virtually nothing to help us compete with people that can still crank through their full DPS rotation. They're going to kick our ass with or without that buff. That's a Blizzard raid design issue and I think far more relevant to our current DPS state than the bleed nerf in question.

10% here, 2% there and so on after a while it adds up. AND 10% of the only thing you have (becouse of time off target) is a big deal. I am not trying to get Ferals to #1 on the charts. But I do think with the current raid designs the Nerf was extra bad. It is more than 10% loss of total DPS on the fights we are talking about. Like I said a direct damage buff(shred) doesn't help when the boss is flying through the air.

Be sure to subscribe to The Fluid Druid RSS feed and follow me on twitter! @Sylvaneart

The nerf was bad, but not that big a deal. Ferals do significantly more damage when Atra is in the air than almost any other melee DPS class. And Atra is actually one of the fights where ferals do well compared to other melee. Not perfectly, but better.

It's not like they were doing all that well before the nerf on Atra anyway.

Really, as long as ferals have nothing to do with all those extra CPs they generate they're going to be doing subpar scaling. As long as crit, agility and to a certain extent haste are devalued because CP generation doesn't matter and the rotation is simple, ferals aren't going to improve that much unless scaling is ridiculously improved. Raid design is a big deal here - but ferals should still be able to compete with other melee.

A second reason is that raid design favors ranged, but even on melee-friendly fights ferals are often disfavored due to the lack of bleeds finishing themselves out on a target. Every time you don't get all your ticks of rip and rake, that's bad for a feral. It's still the 'right' thing to do for most cases, but it also means again that CP is wasted and all that mastery is wasted.

felhoof wrote:Every time you don't get all your ticks of rip and rake, that's bad for a feral...

True, which is another plus mark for buffing our DD and lowering the emphasis on our bleeds, right? Totally agreed that the bleed nerf is not a big deal, I just disagree that it was even bad. I'll agree with you guys if someone can point conclusively to Atramedes and other "flyaway" logs vs standstill fights and show a decently higher bleed:shred ratio of damage.

You have to admit that is a pretty damn lucky pick, to pick the best feral Atramedes parse, and find that his damage is within 2% of what he would've done if we were operating with the bleed "nerf" patch - on a bleed-friendly fight, no less. It certainly doesn't conclusively prove that the patch was "not a nerf", but the parses I've looked at over time have all turned out similar and I haven't seen any parses backing up the nerf argument. I just did Tundor's numbers at the #13 parse, and he shows pre-patch he would've been at 98.4% of today's numbers.

Just noticed I was grabbing off the 10 man normals list, so I grabbed the #1 (Slott) off the Heroic 25's and he comes out at only 96% of today's total, if we were still using the old +bleeds method. So there's three points of data, showing so far that the +Shred patch actually gave us a +1-4% damage boost on a bleed friendly fight (and I think that 1% can be cancelled out due to the slight increase in Shreds today where we once spent that energy on rare FB's pre-patch which I am not accounting for; bringing them closer to dead even).

Shred wasn't boosted by 25%; more like 10%. I don't know where you're getting 25% from.

And no, I don't think the nerf to bleeds is bad. I actively lauded it when it happened and I think more should still happen. Alternately, give ferals two ways of dealing damage - short burst damage that isn't sustainable but is strong, or long-duration bleeding damage when you want to do maximum DPE and not worry about time. Right now they don't really have the former at all, and it really hurts.

The nerf to bleeds has been played up as some horrible gotterdammerung for ferals, but really it was a net wash. It didn't help or hurt their DPS significantly on much of anything. Atramedes is probably the best case where you can say that it hurt feral dps, and ferals already sucked on the fight.

Really, as long as mastery was ridiculously OP and ferals were only caring about bleeds, ferals were always going to be in a bad place. All gear would have sucked unless it was awesome (with mastery), all fights that had any abilities that would cause their bleeds to not tick fully would have sucked for ferals tremendously, etc. Balance is good.

My personal preference would be to balance ferals so that haste is the best stat, because ultimately more haste means more white attacks (which are fairly easy to balance) and more action, and everyone likes doing more things. Doing more shreds is fun. Mastery, by comparison, is just not that fun. I really wish they had allowed haste to affect feral dots.

Well likewise, I don't know where you are getting 10% from and I am nearly dead certain that is incorrect, as that would've caused a near mutiny when Blizzard announced it as a simple "shift" in DPS #'s - everyone knows Rip+Rake % is a higher portion of our damage than Shred+Mangle, how would we have possibly accepted +10% for -10%?

I'll try to dig up where it got calced but I am pretty sure it came from a solid source at EJ's or maybe Emmerald's.

Well, I found where I had calc'd it out, you're welcome to correct it if you like. I was farily confident at the time that it was matching numbers being thrown around by more reputable math guys, most commonly 25%. In comments, posting as Maulrush, 7-01-2011

Cool, that's all I'm trying to say here - I've seen a lot of people, not just Syl, blame some of our DPS issues on the "PVP changes" and I just don't think that's the case. We figured it to be DPS-neutral then and it appears to be pretty neutral now, in practice. The biggest PVE problem with that patch was the resulting obsolescence of FB and the related issues, and that's a legitimate gripe IMHO.

To be fair, one reason that FB can't be that good is because of PvP. They don't want a finisher that does OMGWTF damage so they have to be pretty careful to not boost FB too high.

Similarly they can't add another bleed to ferals because of PvP; bleeds are kinda gross in PvP when they can't be dispelled and they go through armor. So they've got to walk that line.

But yeah - it wasn't PvP that makes ferals suck right now. It's that ferals have a long setup time, had really crappy aoe damage and have fairly meh scaling. That was the start of the expansion and it's the case now, sans the aoe damage. Aoe damage is a bit nuts.

I was thinking about it, and one of the better ways it could be used as the move when you're killing things that live <20 sec or so is to refresh the duration on SR. And have it do that all the time. Yes, it makes the rotation a bit less interesting (especially at 25%), but it also increases feral damage and gives you a reason to actually do it.

"To be fair, one reason that FB can't be that good is because of PvP. They don't want a finisher that does OMGWTF damage so they have to be pretty careful to not boost FB too high."

It would be nice though since Loks especially have always been OP imo. SB, throw on a bleed, get the CP up enough and FB before they can see what happened. If only we could Prowl in combat.... That would be the poo. I myself have never had much luck with PVP being inexperienced and all. Some day...some day.

I'm no expert, but it seems one of the biggest complains for ferals is energy regen, so why not let FB do the same damage as a shred but let it give us a short term energy regen buff, kinda like recoup does for rogues. Just an idea, but I think it could work out nicely.

cynrh wrote:Fate: I don't agree, I use more than 95% of the feral arsenal in pretty much the same way, and the other 5% is trivial crap like using FF to keep people out of stealth or Thorns maybe to act as a "junk buff" to protect another buff. Or more to the point, I use far more of my abilities at various points in PVP (Maim, heals, bearform, CC, etc) and a very very limited subset of those abilities in PVE (for an even more limited set of purposes). Could you give examples of abilities you feel are used so differently in PVE?

Okay, looking at my PvE feral DPS arsenal:

So, Mangle is used as my main attack, not as an opener.

Shred is used only versus stunned or otherwise stationary targets.

Rake, and Rip, I admit, are used the same way - aiming for 100% uptime versus anything that will live more than a few seconds.

TF isn't used as a rotation element, but for burst.

I don't try for 100% melee uptime when fighting melee - instead I try to 5-8 kite, and dump energy as I pass through range of them.

Berserk's use is governed by CC timers/cooldowns, not by DPS timers/cooldowns.

I time powershifts to land just after an opponent's GCD, not just to be used ASAP.

Skull Bash has to be used tactically, and quite possibly on a focus target, rather than just knowing before a fight whether you'll bash everything that pops up, or ignore them all (or in the case of Maloriak, a mix).

Feral Charge is part of your gap-closing arsenal, not just used formulaically in response to shock blast mechanics or target switches.

Ferocious Bite is, admittedly, still used as a last resort, if and only if it's likely to land the kill immediately.

So, to my mind, that's Rip, Rake and FB that don't change much - although the different situation WRT CP management and target switches still changes how those two feel to me.